Our first month wasn't much different from Missouri: living with company, among unpacked boxes, but a wonderful time with loved ones. Now we start living here.
There is a wildness on the peninsula that has caught me by surprise. Animals don't seem threatened by the presence of humans; we're just a curiosity to them. The humans here are a curiosity to me, too...
The first day we were here we saw mule deer, a mother with spotted twin fawns. They looked at us with mild surprise, and then danced off into the clearing across the highway, floating through the air as I had never seen except in Disney cartoons. Since we have been here, the twins have lost their spots. One is getting bigger than the other; it must be a male.
Brazen little red squirrels found my bird feeder. When I went out on the kitchen porch this morning, the birds scattered, but the squirrels continued to eat. I don't mind, as long as they stay on the ground and don't tear up my feeder.
The first bird to find the feeder, the same day I put it up, was a goldfinch. He was eating thistle seeds on the hill just beyond it. By the end of the day, a whole flock of them had come. Goldfinches are abundant here in the summer, an online guide says, but they migrate south in the winter. We'll see if an abundant source of sunflower seeds will entice them to stay.
My bird book has yet to appear in any of the unpacked book boxes, so I'm winging it on the western birds new to me. I know the finches, sparrows and nuthatches; Steller's jay and tanagers were easy to identify. No cardinals! I miss them.
No comments:
Post a Comment